Chapter 1 Coin Minting during the Soviet Revolutionary Regime.
From October 1927 to 1935, the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army established a total of 17 revolutionary base areas throughout the country, carried out an agrarian revolution within the base areas, and abolished the feudal exploitation system. In order to get rid of the plundering and control of the economy of the base areas by the local tyrants, shoddy gentry, and profiteers, each base area has set up revolutionary people's banks one after another to issue its own currency. Among them, nine base areas, including the Soviet Union, Zuojiang, Hunan, Hubei, Hailufeng, Hubei, Henan, Anhui, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu, have issued currency. The revolutionary currency is mainly paper money, and there are silver, copper, cloth and other material currency, of which only the ** Soviet region, western Hunan-Hubei, northwestern Anhui Special Region (Hubei-Henan-Anhui), Sichuan-Shaanxi Province and other four base areas minted copper auxiliary coins. Due to the extremely difficult conditions, most of the copper coins in the base area are of poor quality, and few beautiful products have survived except for the copper coins in the Soviet Union. Coupled with the encirclement and suppression of the Kuomintang and the passage of time, most of the copper coins in the Soviet area are now very rare, and because of their special revolutionary commemorative significance, they are highly valued and cherished by the spring community. Therefore, today's collection and research of copper dollars in the Soviet area has extraordinary significance, and should be vigorously promoted!
Section 1 **Soviet Power
In January, the First National Congress of the Chinese Soviets was held in Ruijin, Jiangxi, where the ** base area is located, and the establishment of the "Provisional Chinese Soviet Republic" was announced, and Xiang Ying and Zhang Guotao were elected as the chairman and vice president. Under the leadership of the workers' and peasants' leaders, the military and civilians in the base areas have carried out various constructions in terms of political power, legal system, economy, education, and culture. The first major event in economic construction is to mint and issue its own currency. ** Base mint was set up in Dongcun Township, Xingguo County, there are many workers, first managed by the township, and later changed to the county, province directly under the jurisdiction, in 1932 after the establishment of the workers and peasants moved to Ruijin, changed to **Mint, the formal mint with the name of the copper coin. Unfortunately, due to the failure of the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression", the first mint also had to transfer the equipment, some materials, and semi-finished products to Longshan in Yudu County for burial before the Long March, and the history of the factory ended here. The central factory minted less than a year (to the year), only minted five cents, one cent two copper coins, and minted a small number of "two horns" silver coins of copper samples, it is estimated that the early trial coins and sent to the leaders of various departments as reference sample coins, now it is rare, rare to see.
Section 2 Soviet Power in Western Hunan-Hubei Province
The Soviet power in western Hunan and Hubei was centered on the Honghu Revolutionary Base Area in Hubei, and the Red Army led by Zhou Yiqun and ** was active in this area. In 1928, the party sent **, Zhou Yiqun and other comrades to Honghu in Hubei Province, Sangzhi County in western Hunan and other areas to organize several local guerrilla units, and used their local connections and ** himself to establish revolutionary armed forces (** used to be one of the most important leading brothers of the Chinese Elders' Association, and had the highest rank and prestige in the most famous and largest underground social organization in old China, and his prestige spread far and wide, which was the greatest favorable condition for him to carry out revolutionary activities in the lower classes and peasant classes before the Long March) After the reorganization of these guerrillas, they became the Fourth Army of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army, and the revolutionary activities in western Hunan and Hubei entered a new stage. The Red Army stamp is a wide, five-pointed star with a sickle and axe in it.
In 1929, the CCP wrote a letter to **, pointing out that the most important task in the countryside at present was to mobilize the masses to carry out an agrarian revolution in depth. Encouraged by this, the base area rapidly expanded its territory, and in July 1930, the Red Sixth Army, which was expanded with the Western Hubei Guerrilla Corps, joined forces in Hubei Gong'an County, and the troops increased to 20,000 at once, forming the Red Second Army Corps, with ** as the commander-in-chief and Zhou Yiqun as the political commissar. Soon after, it was announced that the "Hunan and Hubei Province Soviet" had been established, and it managed not only military activities, but also social management, production management, and economic production activities, and the issuance of the revolutionary's own banknotes and coins was part of its work. At present, this regime has only issued one kind of copper coin, with a face value of one cent, and the inscription is "Hunan and Hubei Western Province Soviet**" Due to Xia Xi's "left-leaning" mistake later, the military defeat and the withdrawal of troops to the Hunan and Hubei borders, and the coinage activities were suspended. As a result, the "one cent" copper coin minted in the area has become an extremely rare historical relic.
In March 1931, the Red Second Army was ordered to be reorganized into the Red Third Army. At this time, the military political commissar was no longer Zhou Yiqun, and the successor Deng Zhongxia had also been removed and replaced by Xia Xi. Xia Xi has just been appointed as the secretary of the ** branch of the Communist Party of China in western Hunan and Hubei provinces, which has just been established. After Xia Xi took office, he cracked down on a group of old leaders such as **, blindly implemented left-leaning adventurism militarily, engaged in sectarianism in organization, and killed dissidents (the famous general Duan Dechang was killed because of his outspokenness), so that the entire Red Third Army suffered heavy losses, so that it lost its division and territory in the fourth anti-"encirclement and suppression" and was forced to withdraw to eastern Guizhou. In the process of retreating, Xia Xi was killed, ** regained control of the whole army, and successfully arrived in Qiandong to join the Red Sixth Army led by Ren Bishi, Xiao Ke, and **, and at the same time restored the number of the Red Second Army Corps, and the two army corps re-opened the revolutionary base area in Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan, and Guizhou to continue the revolution. However, the minting machinery and printing equipment of that year were lost during the retreat, and the paper money and copper coins issued were confiscated and destroyed by the Kuomintang, which is extremely rare to see today.
Section 3 Soviet Power in Northwest Anhui
As its name suggests, the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Revolutionary Base Area is composed of three parts. The first part is the Hubei-Henan border base formed on the basis of the Huang (An) Ma (Cheng) uprising in 1927, and the main leaders are Wu Guanghao, Xu Pengren, Wang Shusheng, etc., of which *** was sent by ** after Wu Guanghao's death in 1929. Wu Guanghao served as the commander of the reorganized Red Seventh Army (later renamed the 31st Division of the 11th Army); The second part is the southeast Henan base area established on the basis of the uprising in the south of Henan Shang (Cheng) in May 1929, the unit number is the Red 32nd Division, and the main leaders are Zhou Weijiong, Xu Qixu, etc.; The third part is the Anhui Province Sixth (An) Huo (County) Uprising Force led by Shu Chuanxian, Xu Baichuan, Jiang Jingtang and others in January 1930, with the number of the 33rd Division. At the beginning of 1930, Guo Shushen, who was appointed by the Communist Party of China, returned to Shanghai to report on his work after inspecting the Hubei-Henan-Anhui region, and after hearing this, he thought it was necessary to unite the three adjacent base areas, so he decided to set up a special committee of the Communist Party of China in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui border area, and organized the above three divisions into the First Army of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. In February of the same year, Guo Shushen returned to the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Border Region with the ** resolution and announced the resolution that he himself would be appointed secretary of the Special Committee of the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Border Region, Xu Jishen would be the commander of the Red First Army, ** would be the deputy commander, and Cao Dajun would be the political commissar; At the same time, the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Border Region Soviet was established, with Gan Yuanjing as chairman to lead the border region to engage in economic construction. The work in the border areas has been very good, as can be seen by looking at the large number of copper coins inscribed "Northwest Anhui Soviet". As for the slogan "The proletariat of the whole world unites", it reflects, on the one hand, the class color of the revolutionary regime, and on the other hand, the fact that the base areas of the three provinces are closely united.
In January 1932, the Red First Army joined the Red 15th Army in the southern Henan base area led by Cai Shenxi and Chen Qi and was reorganized into the Red Fourth Front Army. However, bad luck soon befell the CCP's largest base at the time. The Fourth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, controlled by 26-year-old Wang Ming, sent Zhang Guotao, a well-known leader of the labor movement to the Hubei-Henan-Anhui base area, and gradually replaced Zeng Zhongsheng as the main leader of the Red Fourth Front Army and the head of the party. Zhang Guotao's days in Hubei-Henan-Anhui are the history of the gradual destruction of the Hubei-Henan-Anhui border region. As Wang Ming's sworn friend, Zhang Guotao intensified his efforts to promote left-leaning adventurism, defeated more militarily than he won, and engaged in sectarianism organizationally, which was better than Xia Xi in western Hunan and Hubei, and excluded and killed a large number of major cadres of the original three divisions, such as the famous general Xu Jishen, etc., and cleaned them quite thoroughly, especially the officers from the Huangpu Military Academy were killed under pretext except for a limited number of people (famous generals from Huangpu such as Jiang Jingtang, Xu Baichuan, Chen Qi, Zeng Zhongsheng, etc.), and the Hubei-Henan-Anhui border region once became the first region. The direct result of this reign of terror was the failure of the fourth anti-"encirclement and suppression" campaign, and Zhang Guotao privately led his troops to flee from the base areas in advance, retreat westward, and enter the northern and southern Sichuan and Shaanxi regions to establish a new Soviet power in Sichuan-Shaanxi Province.
The Hubei-Henan-Anhui base area has successively established three banks, among which the Soviet Bank of the Northwest Anhui Special Economic Zone, which has minted the most copper coins, was established in early May of that year, located in Jinzhai, Anhui Province, but more than ten days later, the Red Army captured Mabu, so it moved there and began to cast copper dollars with various waste copper materials. Nowadays, the copper yuan is cast with the place name of "northwest Anhui" and the words "the proletariat of the whole world unites (heh)", a total of 20 wen, 50 wen two denominations. There is also information to prove that the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Provincial Soviet Bank has also minted copper coins of two jiao and five jiao, but so far there has been no real thing, which is a pity. As a result of Zhang Guotao's frenzied implementation of Wang Ming's "leftist" adventurism, the Red Fourth Front Army suffered heavy losses in the Fourth Anti-"Encirclement and Suppression" War in that year, and became the first unit to withdraw from the revolutionary base areas. Thus the subordinate Soviet banks were also closed, and the main equipment and many raw materials were lost. However, the technical force was preserved, and it became the backbone of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Provincial Soviet Mint.
Section 4 Soviet Power in Sichuan-Shaanxi Province.
In the summer and autumn of that year, Zhang Guotao, ** Chen Changhao and others led the Red Fourth Front Army to evacuate the Hubei-Henan-Anhui revolutionary base area and enter Sichuan from the Sichuan-Shaanxi border area. In the following year, the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base Area was established in Tongjiang, Nanjiang, and Bazhong, and in December 1932, the Sichuan-Shaanxi Provincial Provisional Revolutionary Committee was established in Tongjiang, and Kuang Jixun, who had come from the uprising of the 28th Army of the Sichuan Army, served as the provincial chairman. The minting of copper coins has been restarted. In February 1933, the Sichuan-Shaanxi Provincial Soviet was formally established, with Xiong Guobing as its chairman. At that time, the highest military and political organ in the Sichuan-Shaanxi base area was the "Northwest Revolutionary Military Committee," with Zhang Guotao as chairman and ** as commander-in-chief. In March and April, a mint was set up on the outskirts of Tongjiang County to mint coins using an extremely rudimentary and ancient method of melting and minting. Fortunately, in the autumn, *** led his troops to conquer Suidingfu (now Daxian City), an important town in eastern Sichuan, and captured a relatively new set of coinage machines from the warlord Liu Cunhou, as well as a large amount of copper and silver materials. After these rare trophies were transported back to the Kucaoba in Tongjiang, the Red Army in the Sichuan-Shaanxi base area officially established its own mint and began to mint a large number of 200 copper coins engraved with the slogan "** Quanchuan", which fully expressed the determination and courage of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army to carry out the revolution to the end. The currency value of Wen is in line with the current currency usage habits of the Sichuan people. This is a strategy of economic struggle, and it is precisely for the same reason that the 200 Wen large coins minted earlier and the 500 Wen large copper dollars were minted in the later period. The 500 coins were minted with the phrase "the proletariat of the whole world unites," which reflects the kinship between the Sichuan-Shaanxi base area and the Soviet region in northwestern Anhui.
In the course of more than two years of struggle, when the Sichuan-Shaanxi base area was in its heyday, the Red Fourth Front Army had more than 80,000 men in five armies, and established the Soviets of Bazhong City and 22 counties, with a population of more than 5 million. Zhang Guotao continued to practice leftism in Sichuan, continued to kill "dissidents", and a large number of cadres above the company commander level and about 200 people who came from the uprising of the old Sichuan army were ruthlessly purged, including Kuang Jixun, who had received the first award. Therefore, on the one hand, the power expanded rapidly, on the other hand, there were fewer and fewer capable generals, and it had a bad impact on the party's image in the locality, and was regarded as a brutal group without humanity by the local gentry, businessmen and landlords.
History has become a thing of the past, but the Sichuan-Shaanxi copper circle of that year was like a grain of fire, with the footprints of the Red Fourth Front Army scattered all over the northwest land!
* Yu Duan Honggang, "The Historical Background and Basic Situation of Copper Circle Casting in the Soviet Revolutionary Period".
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